


[Abandoned WIP] The Letter

by Zeke Black (istia)



Series: Abandoned WIP [10]
Category: Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years, Lonesome Dove: The Series (Canada)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, M/M, Old West, POV Clay Mosby, Past Clay Mosby/Robert Shelby
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 11:31:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1817029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/istia/pseuds/Zeke%20Black
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clay receives a letter from Olivia that shakes his world (and was meant to be catalyst to a major change). Set in the three-year period between the two series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	[Abandoned WIP] The Letter

**Author's Note:**

> I intended the story to become a first time between Clay and Austin, but didn't get that far. Austin doesn't appear at all.

Another cold morning in Curtis Wells. Not that one could expect anything different given it was December in Montana. Clay Mosby sighed as he poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the table closest to the pot-bellied stove in his empty Ambrosia Club. Sometimes he wondered just why he'd fetched up in this unwelcoming clime as though directed by God's hand. The moment he'd seen Hannah Peale almost two years ago, it'd been like slipping through a veil into another world: one where his Mary was resurrected in another form, identical in appearance, identical in kindness and intelligence and jollity, but _alive_ and full of youthful spirits and independence. Hannah was achingly familiar, yet also her own unique presence. Only their voices differed significantly, Mary's melodious drawl replaced with Hannah's more clipped tones, yet the timbre of Hannah's voice itself was oddly reminiscent; though sometimes he wondered if that was his imagination, placing Hannah's living voice over Mary's long-dead and fading one. But the significant differences in his view of past and present were the voices and the clothes; Mary's fashions, the gowns she still wore in his dreams and his memories, would have been thirteen years out of date for young Hannah Peale.

Thirteen years a pile of decomposing bones at the moment he first saw Miss Hannah Peale on a fresh spring day more than a year-and-a-half ago.

A knock at the door jerked him from his morose thoughts. A figure on the boardwalk was a shadow beyond the shades covering the windows of the front door. He unlocked it and swung it open to Unbob Finch's stringbean figure and wide smile.

"Mr. Mosby, the stage made it in, Luther says the pass ain't snowed up yet, but it might be coming, but he's still able to get through for now and I brung you your mail."

Clay negotiated his way through the confusion of words with the ease of long practice and accepted the bundle of envelopes and a small package. An icy wind swirled around his feet and insinuated its way up his pant legs, skimming up past his knee boots to awaken gooseflesh on his thighs. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that there might be some merit in dressing in the garb of elderly mountain man Curtis, which, while a sartorial horror, might benefit one's survival in this inhospitable environment!

He pulled a coin from his pocket and handed it to Unbob, who closed his hand on it with a toothy grin.

"Thanks, Mr. Mosby!"

Clay started to shut the door, but paused. "Unbob," he called after the man hastening down the steps to the street, "where's Jake?"

Young Jake usually brought him his mail. Unbob turned to look up at him from the street.

"He's stuck in bed with an awful cough. Doc Cleese says he'd be risking his life breathing in the cold air." Unbob's eyes, large as a matter of course, became saucer wide. "But only till his cough's gone. He can go out again then. It'd be awful bad if he couldn't go out until the cold was gone!" He waved his hand and headed up the street, long legs negotiating the frozen ruts of mud with ease.

"Wouldn't it just, considering the cold is likely to be with us for the next four or five months," Clay muttered, shutting the door and locking it again. He hastened back to the table next to the stove and his cooling coffee. He drank as he sorted through the letters.

A fine-grained manila envelope caught his attention and pleasure flowed through him at the sight of the spidery, elegant hand that penned the address. Of all the messages he received from a variety of correspondents, Olivia Jessup's notes were at the forefront of the few that gave him warm anticipation. He got up to pour himself a fresh cup of coffee, poked another stick of cherrywood into the stove, where a ball of sap hissed and sputtered, and settled down. He slit the thick paper of the envelope with the brass letter opener with an image of the Confederate flag etched on its end--a gift, in fact, from Olivia--and pulled out a single sheet of paper. With some disappointment, as Olivia was generally a more expansive writer, he unfolded it. As he read, coldness that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature washed over him like the chill waters off the Hampton tidewater.
    
    
    My Darling Clay,
    
    	Dearest, I am the reluctant bearer of news that it pains me very much to have to convey to you. I would, if only circumstances had allowed, have desired to deliver this news in person, with the hope my presence might cushion the blow a little with the reassurance that you have one loving friend remaining. But I am delaying.
    
    	Clay, I regret to say that we have lost Robert. While my news is secondhand, I have exerted every effort to ascertain its validity. My dear, I'm afraid there is no doubt. His effects were sent to me via the intermediary I hired to investigate; I've enclosed them in a separate parcel. They were confiscated by the sheriff of Avon in South Dakota, the man who apprehended Robert. He was willing to relinquish them for a fee when I presented myself as Robert's next of kin. The ruse was likely unnecessary as I believe the fee alone would have sufficed.
    
    	The brutal facts, dearest, are that Robert was fatally wounded during the commission of a bank robbery in Avon. The three men with whom he was riding were all either killed as well or apprehended. The account of the robbery, as it was told to me and reported in local newspapers, reveals a faultiness in planning that I fear doomed it from the start. Robert, I think we both know, was never the tactician you are. His course since the two of you separated has been a sad spiral downwards. When last I saw him, this past August, he looked peaked and morose. I offered him a place with me, I begged him, but he avowed he was unable to settle. Partly I think it was the ever-present fear of the bounty on his head attracting attention; the other part, I believe, was that the wanderlust the two of you experienced in the years following the war was by then engrained in him. He never managed to find the haven you have.
    
    	As much as I shall miss Robert, I know you will feel the loss far more keenly. I especially regret having to send you this news so close to the anniversary of the death of Mrs. Call. December has not been a kindly month regarding the fates of those you have loved.
    
    	If I can do anything to mitigate your grief, my dearest Clay, I know you won't hesitate to contact me. I would be glad to travel to Curtis Wells as soon as the weather permits, if you but send me word that it would be a help to you. Barring that, I hope you have, by this time, found someone near at hand who can offer you comfort.
    
    	Take care of yourself, dearest. I'll be anxious until I get a letter from you.
    
    	With all my fond love,
    	Olivia
    
    	P.S.: Should the occasion arise and if you believe he would recall me, please remember me to Josiah Peale. My thoughts have been much with him as the anniversary of his daughter's death approaches.

A burning sensation penetrated his attention and he realized coffee had slopped from the mug in his shaking hand onto his skin. He put the mug down and set down the letter with care. A blank darkness filled his vision, blotting out the cheering familiarity of the Ambrosia Club: his home, his place in the world found at last after years of being lost.

Lost and alone through all those interminable years except for Robert's constant presence. Robert's voice the only one, too often to count, that had penetrated the darkness clouding his mind. Robert's voice and Robert's touch the anchors that kept dragging him back toward light and sanity despite his resistance. Robert's arms encircling him and Robert's body a staunch, strong support always beside him was the only vivid memory he had of the day he'd seen the burned-out shell of Hatton Willows, with the three rough graves nearby, other than the overwhelming agony and horror that had enveloped him. That time, it had been Robert's silence that tugged at him as Robert held him close after his rage had exhausted him. Robert's body, his touch, had been the only warmth 

Robert had never let go of him in all the years they'd known each other. He'd lived his entire adult life secure with the confidence that Robert would never let him go.

And in the end, it was he who'd let go of Robert.

He looked sharply toward the back door of the saloon, seeing again Robert coming in the door that last time. He heard the echo of Robert's boots on the floor, and his nostrils twitched at the smell Robert brought with him of rain-heavy wind and too many days in the saddle and sleeping rough, a scent with a bittersweet nostalgia of its own. He jerked in remembrance of his fear when Robert collapsed in his arms. He'd felt the first spike of terror since that last day at Hatton Willows, when he'd lost everything that meant the most to him--yet still had Robert. On the day fourteen years later when Robert came to him here with a bullet in his shoulder, he'd faced for the first time the reality of what it would mean to him to lose Robert.

And yet he'd sent Robert away. He'd taken the security of Robert's unwavering love and bound it into the fibers of his being. He'd leaned on Robert all those years he'd needed him. He'd taken everything Robert offered him: his loyalty and his intelligence; his staunch strength and visceral knowledge of Clay that made Robert know what he needed sometimes better than he did himself.

He'd been sure he was right to stay in Curtis Wells, despite Robert's objections and warnings that he was confused in his desires.

_Hannah. Mary is dead._

_It's time to leave, Clay._

But he'd stayed, choosing his dreams of a new home and the hope of a new love over the steadfast reality of Robert. And after Robert had acquired the bounty on his head for the accidental killing, Robert had had no say in whether they were together or not. He'd had no choice but to leave, and Clay, despite the wrench, had made Robert leave alone.

Because, as always throughout the years they shared their lives, what Clay wanted and needed came first.

He stood, his thighs knocking the table hard enough to make it shift on the floor with a skritch of wood against wood. He pushed the chair away and paced away, across the room, pointlessly, just needing to move, to try to shed the agitation burning across his senses. He stood at the bar, staring into a fog at a succession of memories: young Robert emerging from the pond after a dive with his body and hair sleek as a seal's, his face exhilarated and challenging; Robert laughing, hair burnished by Southern sunshine; Robert sweaty and bloody on the battlefield; Robert shaking against him with fever in that damned POW camp; Robert's strong arms encircling him, the only warmth in a world gone icy, as they stared at the graves of Mary and his parents and the ashes of his home. Robert crying with him, Robert holding him.

Robert always at his back, at his side, close as a shadow, but hard, substantial; Robert's body strong and sure against his.

Robert lying beside him during countless nights--far more nights, in the end, than he'd had with Mary. Robert's familiar body close against his all those countless nights when he jerked awake from a nightmare; Robert beside him as each grey dawn arrived. Robert's mouth on his tasting of the salt of Clay's own anguish. Robert's lilting voice in his ear a murmur of home no matter how far north and west they roamed.

Robert had been all he'd had left of home: wherever he'd gone, however far he wandered, he'd had the familiarity of Robert's accent as a comfort. Whatever strange roads they traveled, he always had a piece of home as long as Robert was with him.

He ducked his head, leaning on the bar, lost in the swirl of memories. With the need to grasp hold of something, hang onto anything, he closed his hand around a whiskey bottle. Its cool smoothness against his palm was as familiar as Robert's hand used to be: Until he'd severed himself from Robert's steadfast reality to lust after a dream he couldn't admit he never had a chance of making real.

He turned and flung the bottle; it hit the wall above the piano that sounded like a pistol shot in the quiet room. Whiskey ran down the wall and glass clattered onto the piano. He swung back around to the bar, trying to control his breathing. The air seemed suddenly overheated and heavy, pressing in on him, like being in a claustrophobic bath house.

He swung around on his heel and strode to the door. Shrugging into his greatcoat, he stepped outside and drew the crisp air into his lungs with a gasp of rare welcome. Sun reflected off the windows of the Dove, giving the air a bright intensity that made the snow covering the street seem pristine despite the frozen, muddy ruts gouged down its center. The day was early enough that there was little traffic. The town had a sleepy, peaceful quality that belied the violence that could erupt at any moment.

His town. His creation, for good or ill--and, some days, he wasn't sure which it was. The home he'd forged for himself with will and determination over this past year of grief and fury since the second major loss in his life. He'd fought anyone who tried to wrest it from him, this _place_ , this _home_ , _his_ ; fought for it with all the savagery he'd have used if he'd been at Hatton Willows when the destroyers arrived. He'd been denied the chance to defend his home then; he wouldn't be denied a second time.

Much as he hated the cold and snow, he couldn't deny that the new layer that had fallen overnight invested Curtis Wells with a particular beauty he'd known nowhere else. His step faltered as he saw a slender, graceful form gliding across the frozen pond, her coat tails flying behind her like the shadow of her thick, long hair. He looked involuntarily to his right, moving forward a few steps until he could see through the alley to the pond in the distance. A year ago, he'd sat on a log there and watched his private definition of beauty animated before his eyes. Interposed on the vision of the skater was one of a near identical figure twirling on the dance floor, thick dark hair flying, her cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling, in a southern clime and 1850's hooped satin gown, part of a world of glitter and refinement far removed from this frontier crudity that, nevertheless, had offered its own example of grace embodied, unexpectedly, in a newspaperman's daughter.

He pulled his eyes away and strode past the mouth of the alley, past the Gunshop, closed and dark, past Twyla's, skirting a pair of men staggering up the stairs and through the doors. The plains stretched before his eyes beyond the last house and the windmill, with a vast sky overhead like a blue crystal bowl; like no firmament ever seen in Virginia. The hill, topped with aspens, drew his eyes with the promise of a retreat where he could be alone without a prying gaze as he tried to assimilate his latest loss, which seemed too immense to comprehend.

At least without Robert beside him to help him understand the new parameters of his life.

He stopped and turned around, abruptly aware of a destination calling him. He skirted the windmill and ignored the main street, choosing instead to swing around the backs of the last row of buildings. He cut across the field until he reached the wide road leading to the church. The mud of the ruts was frozen to hard pan under the layer of snow. It provided a firm footing and he covered the ground with long strides, veering off at the approach to the closed door to go around the side.

His steps took him unerringly to Hannah's grave. Josiah had kept it neat and had tended through the summer and autumn the flowers he planted on it in the spring, but the plot now was as featureless under the snow as every other. The granite headstone had withstood almost a year of Montana weather, from beating sun to icy rain, yet it still seemed to have the sheen of newer stone in comparison to many of the others. He stood over the grave and touched the curve of the stone. He'd bought the best headstone he could find in this godforsaken wilderness and employed a stone carver in Miles City. A paltry gesture, but the last, and the only, respect he could openly pay her with her husband gone, her father in mental collapse from grief, and her brother away.

He hadn't been able to do even that much for his parents and Mary. He and Robert had been in the worn remnants of their uniforms when they'd finally arrived home. Robert had made him stop for food and rest along the journey, but even Robert hadn't been able to restrain Clay's headlong rush those last few miles to Hatton Willows. He gripped the stone and lifted his eyes to the sky, feeling the sting of the cold air in his eyes. The edge of the stone, sharp against his palm even through the leather glove, grounded him from the memory of matched dark eyes shining. Mary's eyes shone for him. Hannah's, however....

He ran his eyes over the chiseled words: Hannah Call. He let a sardonic grimace twist his lips. Newt Call hadn't cared enough to stay to bury the wife who adored him, but she carried his name for eternity.

Mary's name, and his parents', were daubed in whitewash on crude wooden crosses when he saw their graves in a makeshift plot near the charred pile of what had been one of the finest houses in Virginia. He hadn't had the resources to replace those markers. By the time he'd pulled himself together and acquired the means via gambling dens, it had only been to learn his family's property had been given to a Yankee. The man hadn't welcomed the trespass of two ex-Reb officers, especially with one of them being the former owner, and had said only that he'd had the bodies dug up and moved to the nearest public cemetery, where they'd been interred together in a common, unmarked grave. With Robert's restraint helping him curb his temper and keeping him sane, he'd pulled himself together long enough to acquire the funds in judicious poker games to provide a fitting gravestone for his family, in keeping with their proud name, long history in Virginia, and his love for them.

It'd been his last coherent act for five dark years during which only Robert's voice and Robert's touch had kept him from joining them, either from deliberate choice or through the indirect consequences of behavior he made little effort to rein in.

Death took every person who had ever meant home to him, one after another, until he was left stranded in this foreign wasteland with nothing but a single grave as a locus of the anguish that dogged him. Anguish for having reached home too late to save his wife from rape and murder, his aging parents from slaughter; anguish for having failed to realize Hannah's danger until it was too late and all he could do was stop Call from flinging himself futilely into the fire after her. He'd knelt in the street barely aware of Call in his arms and watched flames light up the chill Montana night while thoughts of the bonfire Hatton Willows must have made on a sultry Virginia day eighteen years in the past divided his mind between present and past agony.

He pulled his hand from the frozen stone, feeling its icy coldness lingering through his glove. He'd felt similarly bone-deep cold despite the heat of the day he'd stood over his family's grave and looked at the newly erected headstone, fine and large and elegant. Only Robert's hand on his back had been a spot of warmth, and he'd leaned into it and let Robert guide him away.

He cast his eyes over the empty landscape, feeling a desperate clutch in his chest. He hadn't seen Robert in over a year, since before Hannah's death, yet he'd known Robert was out there, living his own harum-scarum life. He'd even kept a general awareness of where Robert was located in his continual travels, with Olivia the safe contact between them. He'd received notes from Robert enclosed in some of Olivia's missives, the sloping, pointed writing and breezy shorthand comments the nearest he'd been able to get to the man he'd spent years so close to that sometimes he'd awakened in the night uncertain for a few hazy moments which of the limbs he could feel were his and which were Robert's.

He shivered, huddling into his thick wool coat. He thrust his hand, still aching with cold, into his pocket, and struck off toward town across the unmarred blanket of snow covering the field. A shadow crossed the snow and his eyes snapped upward to the graceful, deadly form of an eagle circling high above, on the hunt. It moved silent as a sniper overhead while his own footsteps crunched like shots in the stillness.

When he neared the edge of town, children's laughter drew his eyes to a group of figures building a snowman and making a colorful jumble against the snow. He spotted Unbob's tall leanness among them just as Unbob looked up and waved at him gaily. Beside Unbob, a blonde head turned to peer toward Clay and he snapped his head away, not trusting what Mattie might read in him. He felt unguarded, stripped of his armor, and hurried toward the only refuge he had left, ignoring the townspeople he passed as he strode up the center of the main street.

Weary relief loosened his limbs as he gained the sanctuary of the Ambrosia Club. He locked the door and leaned his back against it, taking a deep breath. The mixed smells of beer, whiskey, and cigar smoke was as familiar to him as the scent of the lavender sachets his mother had tucked inside his pillow covers once were, as representative now of safety as the small signs of his mother's care and love had once been.

Robert was dead. The world he'd known was blood and ashes and everyone he'd ever loved was gone.


End file.
